Posted on 05/07/2016 3:26:27 PM PDT by Kaslin
PBS correspondent Jeffrey Brown explained “Mapplethorpe was best known for his homoerotic photographs and explicit sadomasochistic imagery, and the political and legal battles around them. Even now, we’ve chosen not to present his most controversial work.”
But PBS didn’t just censor the art. They couldn’t even bring themselves to describe it. We’re not told about Mapplethorpe’s naked self-portrait with a bullwhip us his anus. We’re not told about his pornification of a little boy and a little girl. We’re not told about “Jim and Tom, Sausalito” – a photo in which one man urinates into another’s mouth.
So when the liberal curators say that Mapplethorpe’s art wasn’t properly appreciated because we were “preoccupied” with it as evidence in an obscenity trial, they’re making a (disguised) case for obscenity.
BRITT SALVESEN: For several years after the culture wars debate of the late ’80s, early ’90s, it was impossible to see the work as art because we were preoccupied with its status as evidence, let’s say.
JEFFREY BROWN: As part of that culture war.
SALVESEN: Yes. And that really forestalled an assessment of his artwork.
BROWN: Mapplethorpe grew up in a conservative Irish Catholic household in Queens, New York, and in the 1970s became part of the city’s burgeoning gay scene. He focused from the beginning on three main subjects: portraiture, including artists and celebrities of the day, floral still lifes, and sex and the body.
That’s as close as PBS gets to describing the outrageous sex shots – they explore “sex and the body.” So when the late Sen. Jesse Helms is brought in as the only contrary soundbite, he’s dramatically out of context. For all the PBS viewer knows, he just didn’t like tasteful nudes, like he’d disapprove of Michelangelo:
BROWN: He would achieve fame, but for the public at large that came in 1989 when North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms took to the Senate floor to decry federal funding for a traveling exhibition of Mapplethorpe’s work.
SEN. JESSE HELMS: I don’t even acknowledge that it’s art. I don’t even acknowledge that the fellow who did it was an artist. I think he was a jerk.
BROWN: Bowing to political pressure, Washington’s Corcoran Museum cancelled the show, and when it went on to the Cincinnati Arts Center, its director was arrested and charged with obscenity. He was later acquitted.
But Mapplethorpe’s work would for years after be seen in this context. The Los Angeles exhibitions contain the controversial work, accompanied by warning signs of their explicit content. Mapplethorpe himself, this is his last self-portrait, died of AIDS, at age 42, just before the cultural tempest burst.
Late in the piece, Brown ushered in the HBO filmmakers/propagandizers, where again there is a reference to Mapplethorpe’s shock tactics, with no examples:
FENTON BAILEY: I think he was playing something of a game of cat and mouse with his audience and critics. I think he knew that it would provoke, but he also said he never was intending to shock people.
BROWN: I mean, do you take that at face value? How could it not shock people?
BAILEY: I do and I don’t. You know, exactly. I mean, he knew that the key here was to photograph things, to document things that people considered outside of the realm of art. The way he did it was to elevate them and make them beautiful. The composition and the lighting was incredible. And so, he made what other people just dismissed as pornography, he made it art, and made us look at it seriously.
But photographs (or paintings, or sculptures) are judged not just on their composition, but on their subject matter. If Mapplethorpe had taken a gloriously well-lit black-and-white photograph of a baby aborted at eight months, that would be seen as obscene by his leftist mythologizers.
Brown and PBS find it unnecessary to discuss the objection that taxpayers shouldn't be forced to subsidize art that is obscene...since PBS wouldn't want to discuss how taxpayers shouldn't be forced to subsidize TV news shows with a very one-sided tilt to the left. In this case, it was doubly offensive to the conservative, like a sanitized version of the 1991 outrage Tongues Untied.
I don't even want to be forced to subsidize art that isn't obscene.
Mapplethorp did from HIV/AIDS.
Good
A well deserved death
Like nobody else regrets sharing a selfie on Facebook?
Leftists always hide the details of “gay” activity. They’re like Moslems who consider themselves “vilified” when someone reads the text of the Koran.
No pictures PLEASE.
One gauge of where an ‘art-defender’s’ mind is really at is what they think about art they don’t like, and its treatment, such as The Triumph of Civic Virtue statue that once had prominent place in front of the Queens County Courthouse. And it’s so beyond ridiculous now after having been through all the arguments in New York about ‘art’ that was things like a crucifix in urine or a portrait of Mary the Mother of God defecated on, alongside this Mapplethorpe filth, and then seeing The NYT avoid art that depicted Mohammad, etc.
Another HUGE waste of money robbed from the taxpayer.
It’s amazing what they call Art
Funny, it would not be hard at all to describe illustrations of Mohammed.
For example, "It's a picture of a middle-aged man in traditional Arab garb." "It's a picture of a middle-aged man wearing a turban." "It's a picture of a middle-aged man with a sword, riding a camel." Etc.
I remember when I first saw this guy’s work. The black and white photography was professional. But it was just a large penis next to a calla lily. Or some flower in a butt crack. Is this really noteworthy art that critics need to discuss?
That isn't "art" - it is evil.
Soon to hang on the White Hut wals.
A lot of the American people like Mapplethorp; do they know why they do?
In the 80's and into the 90's AIDS was an absolute death sentence and I saw more such patients than I care to recall.It was a very,*very* ugly death...a death that,one could argue,,most of them brought upon themselves.
And it seems to me that this pig deserved an ugly death more than most.
And the evidence that “a lot” of Americans have even a faint notion of Robert Maplethorp’s existence would be what?
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